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raspberries. Guatemalan growers were understandably distressed by unproven assumptions that their raspberries had caused the outbreak. They voluntarily suspended shipments but also “kicked the C.D.C.’s field investigator off their farms [and] denounced the American scientists as snipers fighting a trade war on behalf of the growers’ California competitors.” Reports quoted a spokesman for the berry growers: “Last year the guerrillas were in the fields asking my workers about their conditions . . . and this year it was the C.D.C. The C.D.C. is killing us. They kill us every time they open their mouths.” The growers charged the United States with unfair trade practices: “Cyclospora? . . . They can’t find it. . . . Protectionist forces find bugs or whatever to protect their market. It’s a commercial war.”7

To add to such complexities, some countries do have food safety standards higher than ours, which is one reason they resist imports of our genetically modified soybeans and corn, as discussed in part 2 of this book. As we will see, such disputes fall under the purview of the multinational World Trade Organization, a higher-level international entity that takes precedence over the Codex Commission. As is often the case with food safety, the ability of U.S. regulatory agencies to ensure the safety of imported foods is influenced by politics—in this case, global politics. With that said, we can now return to the measures we might take—as individuals and as a society—to promote food safety at every stage of production, from farm to table.

ALTERNATIVE #1: EDUCATE

When it comes to food safety, the public bears all of the health risks. But does that mean that we also must bear the entire burden of preventive measures? Of course, home cooks should follow basic principles of food safety, especially because doing so is not difficult and is almost always effective. Cooking kills most microbial pathogens, and cooked food remains relatively free of them when refrigerated or stored properly. Surveys, however, frequently find that home cooking practices violate the FDA’s manual of food safety rules, the Food Code. This should be no surprise; hardly anyone has heard of it. Furthermore, the code is easy to violate; one merely needs to wipe a counter with an old sponge, use a dish towel more than once, store fresh and cooked foods on the same refrigerator shelf, or forget to wash hands. Even so, home code violations cause much less illness than those made by out-of-home food preparers who did not follow food safety rules.8

Nevertheless, addressing food safety in the home is now a primary goal of national public health policy. In 1980, when the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) established its first ten-year plan to improve health practices, officials estimated that nearly 75% of food-borne infections originated in restaurants, institutional food services, or processing plants. The plan mentioned washing hands and proper food handling as useful educational measures for workers in the food industry. Ten years later, DHHS assigned home cooks their own food safety objective: “Increase to at least 75 percent the proportion of households in which principal food preparers routinely refrain from leaving perishable food out of the refrigerator for over two hours and wash cutting boards and utensils with soap after contact with raw meat and poultry. (Baseline: for refrigeration of perishable foods, 70 percent; for washing cutting boards with soap, 66 percent; and for washing utensils with soap, 55 percent, in 1988).”9 This meant that by the year 2000, 75% of home cooks should be routinely washing cutting boards with soap, as compared to 66% in 1988. The 1988 baseline figures indicated that a sizable proportion of the population already followed safe food-handling practices fairly often—or at least said they did.

In 2000, with foodborne infections increasing in frequency and severity, DHHS assigned an entire section to food safety in its ten-year plan for 2010. The overall goal, to reduce foodborne illnesses, includes three objectives